9 comments:

Albert
said...

My ex-roommate went to Harvey Mudd for undergrad and Boalt for law school. The problem with Harvey Mudd is that a lot of high powered east coast law firm have not heard of it. When he went to interviews, people asked how was Harvey Mudd compared to MIT?

Does the Millikan Library still have the old red hard covered Feynman Lectures? The one I saw, back in 87 or so, was obviously donated to Caltech by a Catholic Father, who in turn received the volumes as a gift from Feynman himself as there was a hand written dedication by Feynman (To Father blah blah, .... R. Feynman), and he did not even write it right. Feynman messed up a few words, crossed them out, and rewrote them.

America's most elite universities use criteria other than g. Despite this being UNIQUE among the world's most elite universities Steve believes it's for the best. It hasn't occurred to Steve that these additional criteria only have predictive validity WITHIN a system which selects its elite with these additional criteria. He thinks of the soft skills, leadership ability, ambition, etc. as ABSOLUTE traits of the individual which have shown themselves useful in American society a society Steve implicitly supposes is not one society among many others present and historical but itself ABSOLUTE.

As far as college admissions go, the world ex-US (with the exception of Canada) does it right. The point isn't that admissions be based on the ridiculous "g", which is so often spoken of as if it were a thing, but that they be objective and transparent, a high g loading necessarily follows. Canadian unis admit based on grades alone I think. This is even worse.

What if the US provided free university education via state run universities, and these all had perfectly transparent objective admissions, but non-government-run institutions continued to play the sneaky games they do now. The libertarian in me thinks private institutions should have a right of free association (of course, we'd probably destroy them via taxation, but that's besides the philosophical point).

I think you make a strong point if you say "let universities have any criteria that they want, but force them to be honest about what they are doing else strip away all state funding and tax benefits". The main reason for their sneakiness is that they wish to hide what they are doing.

If I said they only rely on scores then I was incorrect. They do look at grades, letters of recommendation, etc. The goal is to find the most promising scientists, but I don't think they've accepted that scores are the single factor that best indicates that promise.